KDevelop 3.4 has been released, bringing many new features to KDE's Integrated Development Environment. The first major release in over a year closes more than 500 bugs. There is an impressive list of additional features including improved Qt 4 support, new debugging abilities, more attractive default user interface layout, and improvements for C++, Ruby, and PHP support. The developers have put together a slideshow to showcase the new features.

Why wasn't it referred to as a PDF file outlining the features? What came into my mind on mention of a slide show, was a PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org's Impress presentation!

That aside, while I agree that many bugs were quashed and new features introduced, Kdevelop by default, has terrible fonts! These fonts are blurry and not clear/crisp as one would expect of a new product in this day and age.

"Why wasn't it referred to as a PDF file outlining the features? What came into my mind on mention of a slide show, was a PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org's Impress presentation! "

The term "slide show" refers to a certain form of a presentation. It does not refer to a special media, file format or output device. The classical slide show uses foils / slides, printed with a laser printer or done by hand, that are projected onto a wall (or something similar) using a overhead / daylight projector ("Polylux"). It's not a video or sound file. It does not to refer to a special file type created by and only viewable with the proper application.

The use of a PDF file is a relative good way to share a slide show via Internet. PDF is available nearly everywhere, not like the proprietary MICROS~1 "PowerPoint" formats. Surely something like OpenOffice Impress was used to create the slides, but they were exported to PDF in order to make the content availabe for many platforms without the need of installing huge office software packages. A good idea in my opinion.

A slide show as you might prefer it can easily be done with

% xpdf -fullscreen showcase.pdf

after downloading the file from the location given in the article's description.

Most slideshows I see are PDFs. I would say this is the standard for most mathematical talks. Might be related to the fact that latex produces PDF slideshows.

The fonts are not the default fonts. This are the fonts that the creator of the document uses. If the fonts are not clear/crisp it might be the case because you run your display with a different resolution (dots per inch) and are looking at a screenshot.

I very much doubt that KDevelop itself is choosing which fonts are used and how they are rendered. It will use the system-wide KDE settings for font rendering.

You may have tried the tips below before, but if not:

The DejaVu font used by default in the interface in Kubuntu is used for almost everything and isn't as well suited to user interface controls as the Tahoma font in Windows XP or Segoe UI in Vista. XP and especially Vista has excellent typography because Microsoft invested a lot of time and effort into getting it right. However, it is possible to get clear, readable text in a modern Linux distribution using only the tools that come in the box (ie. no microsoft fonts or rebuilding freetype). The evidence is currently staring back at me. When will this be made as easy as it is in Vista? I can't answer that question.

So, how can you get better font rendering in KDE?

Adjusting the font-rendering options in the KDE Control Panel (or "System Settings" for Kubuntu users) may help.
Go to the KDE Control Panel -> Appearance -> Fonts

Ensure that the "Use anti-aliasing" is checked. Click the "Configure..." button next to it. Tick the "Use sub-pixel hinting" box, and set the hinting style to full.
The colour-arrangement box (which by default has the caption "RGB" with three vertical bars) is important to get right for this to work. The default option is correct for most monitors, so try that for now and click the "Apply" button. Then start a new KDE application (such as KDevelop - but make sure there are no instances of the same program already running), and see if any difference is notable. If the characters have weird fringes of colour around them, try the other options in the colour-arrangement box.

Subpixel hinting is nice, but it should be noted that if one is using nVidia's proprietary drivers, subpixel hinting in KDE seems to bring massive performance penalties. Any combo of greyscale hinting, non-nVidia card or non Qt toolkit is not as bad *weird*

Problem is there's nothing close to Qt Designer for the GNOME/GTK environment. GLADE doesn't even come close, and it never will. KDE will always have the superior development tools. It's a shame that (IMHO) KDE just doesn't look or act as consistent as GNOME. Hopefully KDE4 will change my mind, but most of the hype around Plasma kinda disintegrated into more of the same talk about how great Qt4 is. Slots and signals, unfortunately, won't make all of the unintuitive, unlabeled button widgets go away. I don't want to hover over each button to find out what it does!!

Slots and signals, unfortunately, won't make all of the unintuitive, unlabeled button widgets go away. I don't want to hover over each button to find out what it does!!

Actually, that was one of the very 1st things that was changed - all buttons now by default have text displayed underneath them. Since they are so much larger it also forces the developer to choose the most important ones meaning they are much more intuitive as well since you don't have a million that do different things a lot of people never use.

Of course, that behavior can be overridden but from what I've seen all the standard kde apps are doing it that way.

That's great! I'm glad that one of my last remaining major gripes with KDE is being addressed. KDE has been getting cleaner and less cryptic throughout the 3.x series, but the lack of text labels is just wrong. Unless is a really obvious what the buttons do (firefox for example), they should have text labels. So this pleases me greatly.

But the text lables are not missing, they have been there forever(since KDE 2.0). It has not been the default setting, but it is in the library so it works on all KDE apps. You can configure it on a app by app basis or for the whole desktop.

I'm not a native English speaker, so not sure if this is a typo or if it really makes sense:

New PHP Parser / code competition

Did they mean "code completion"? IIRC, th code completion in Kdevelop for PHP was bound to pressing a key for each word. I hope they made it automatic, because if you do want code completion having to press a key all the time is quite uncomfortable.

Anyway, congrats to the team for the release. I'm looking forward to trying it soon.